planted city

Here a few brick-heavy shots of Portland, Oregon from late April of this year. I was down there with a posse to explore the city and feast at the annual food cart festival. Good times, good times!

From The Economist:

MORE and more Americans are taking to the road on two wheels. Between 1977 and 2009 the total number of annual bike trips more than tripled, while the bike’s share of all trips rose from 0.6% to 1%. Commuting cyclists have also increased in number, with twice as many biking to work in 2009 as in 2000.

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The growth comes thanks to cycle-friendly policymaking and increases in government spending. In Portland, which brought in a comprehensive programme, cycling levels have increased sixfold since the early 1990s. In Chicago the motivation is to improve the quality of life, and thus encourage both businesses and families to move there.

In a forthcoming book, “City Cycling”, John Pucher and Ralph Buehler argue that the bike boom needs to be expanded to a broader cross-section of people. Almost all the growth in cycling in America has come from men aged 25-64. Rates of cycling have actually fallen slightly among women and sharply among children, most probably because of nervousness about safety. But in fact cycling is getting safer all the time. According to a paper by Messrs Pucher and Buehler with Mark Seinen, fatalities per 10m bike trips fell by 65% between 1977 and 2009, from 5.1 to 1.8. In their book, the authors claim that the health benefits of cycling far exceed the safety risks.

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As 48% of trips in American cities are shorter than three miles, there is big potential for further growth.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: City Cycling)

Green Infrastructure: The 10 Largest Green Roofs in the World (Infographic)

From McGraw-Hill Construction:

Green roofs are gaining acceptance in dozens of countries, joining other forms of green infrastructure that are being used to mitigate environmental problems of urban centers.

For example, vegetated roofs “are very good at managing stormwater. Most extensively planted green roofs will hold the first inch of rainfall and slow any additional rainfall, thus reducing peak flows and lowering the stress on combined sewer overflows,” says Steven Peck, founder and president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities (GRHC).

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Many cities throughout the U.S. and Europe have green-roof mandates or incentives in place. Stuttgart, Germany, requires green roofs on all new flat-roofed industrial buildings. In 2007, Pittsburgh enacted an law establishing stormwater volume reduction standards for properties greater than 10,000 sq ft, including on-site retention of the first inch of rainfall through any combination of infiltration, evapotranspiration and rainwater harvesting. Portland, Ore., requires new city-owned buildings and existing buildings in need of a roof replacement to install a green roof on at least 70% of the roof area.

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Green roofs trace their origins back several centuries, to sod roofs on homes and barns in Scandinavia—or even further, if we consider the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But modern green roofs, involving manufactured layers of growing medium and vegetation, developed in Germany in the 1960s. And Germany is believed to be the country where green roofs are most popular, with about 10% of the roofs “greened,” encouraged by a system of government grants to property owners.

Check out the rest of the article and a slideshow of the 10 largest greenroofs in the world here.

Related:

• ‘Green Roofs & Solar Panels: The Future of Renewable Energy?’ (Clean Technica)

(Infographic source: McGraw-Hill Construction) 

A quote from Paul Hawken on optimism, pessimism, and building a sustainable future. It is taken from his remarkable commencement address to the University of Portland’s Class of 2009.

WalkScore ranks the ‘Top 25 Most Transit Friendly US Cities’ 

From Triple Pundit:

The rising gas prices are forcing everybody to take a second look at how they commute. Now WalkScore is helping people do this. They recently released a report of the most transit-friendly cities in the United States.

Cities were graded on how commuter-friendly they are, not just by ranking the quantity of transit available but also how convenient it is to citizens. Walkscore calculated the Transit Score of over 1 million locations in the largest 25 cities and used a combination of algorithms and heat maps to come up with the ranking.

These rankings will help people who are looking for a new home to pick a city with good transit systems.

The scores will also help city officials figure out which transit lines are weak in their cities so they can make improvements.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Triple Pundit)

From The Washington Post:

Is there anything cities can do to encourage cycling? Portland, for instance, has twice as many bike commuters per 1,000 people as Washington. But maybe that’s just because Portland has nicer weather or more young people. It’s not clear that there’s an actual policy issue here.

Yet in a new new study (PDF) in the journal Transport Policy, Ralph Buehler and John Pucher suggest that cities might actually be able to influence how many cyclists are on the road. Perhaps all they have to do is — and this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise — build more bike lanes and bike paths.

Buehler and Pucher found that the presence of off-road bike paths and on-street bike lanes were, by far, the biggest determinant of cycling rates in cities. And that’s true even after you control for a variety of other factors like how hot or cold a city is, how much rain falls, how dense the city is, how high gas prices are, the type of people that live there, or how safe it is to cycle. None of those things seem to matter quite as much. The results, the authors write, “are consistent with the hypothesis that bike lanes and bike paths encourage cycling.”

Check out the rest of the article here. You can read more coverage of the study here, here and here. 

(Photo credit: Atlantic Cities)

From Atlantic Cities:

Once, cities were built to channel storm water away from building foundations and roadways. But as urban areas have grown, rooftops, streets and other impervious surfaces have disrupted cities’ natural hydrology. Today, everyone from water authorities to home gardeners are looking to absorb rain where it falls, eschewing traditional treatment plants and underground sewerage tunnels that effectively neutralize runoff, but don’t do much else.

The first of these projects matured in Portland, Oregon, and Prince George’s County, Maryland. Now, dozens of cities including Washington, Philadelphia, and Louisville have embarked on their own overhauls. 

They are attracted, in part, by the lower cost of planting trees and gardens and retrofitting streets, parking lots and roofs. But it’s also a matter of pay-off. Taxpayers never see the underground fixes. But green infrastructure is something people can use and enjoy, says Joan Furlong, program manager at the Rock Creek Conservancy, a D.C. nonprofit group working with city officials to recruit residents and business owners to the RiverSmart Program.

“It’s become a really hot topic in the last five years or so. Before that green fixes weren’t really accepted by the regulatory agencies,” Gardner-Andrews says, particularly the EPA, which first publicly endorsed green infrastructure just five years ago.

The agency now endorses planting greenery to absorb rainfall as an important tool for adapting to rising sea levels and more extreme storms.

Wildlife also benefits. For instance, if you live in Maryland, planting White Turtleheads in your rain garden can provide much needed habitat for the state butterfly, the Baltimore Checkerspot, which will only lay its eggs on Turtlehead leaves, says Carole Barth, an environmental planner with the Department of Environmental Resources in Prince George’s County, Md.

But doing a rain garden requires careful site planning, experts say. If planted too close to buildings, they can exacerbate rather than alleviate basement flooding. And it’s important to find a patch of land where water percolates well through the soil, which is not necessarily the case everywhere. Researchers have found years of mowing and other activities sometimes leaves the ground so compacted that its about as permeable as concrete.

Check out the rest of the article here. Check out Wikipedia, the Sightline Institute, ASLA and CMHC for more on rain gardens including how to design your own.

(Photo credit: Huston Street Racing; graphic credit: Seine-Rat River Conservation District)

Bikes in the City: ‘On the Right Track’

From Vimeo:

Catherine Ciarlo, Transportation Policy Director in the Office of Mayor Sam Adams in Portland, Oregon, explains how cycle tracks and buffered bike lanes work.

From co.Exist:

What can those of us who recognize the overwhelming scientific evidence regarding the existence of climate change and humanity’s role in it do to help? Some, myself included, have started to feel incredibly betrayed by our governments and almost useless in helping our species right the ship before it’s too late.‬

‪But I believe there is still hope. Not anytime soon at the international levels, nor at the federal level in Western countries (like the U.S. and Canada) where the federal governments refuse to take action on climate change. What we need is a Plan B. If national and multi-national commitment to climate action is unobtainable, we need to focus on actors who are prepared to provide bold leadership into the low-carbon economy. We have no choice. ‬

‪So who are these actors? First and foremost, we need to reconsider the role of cities. Cities now house more than 50% of the world’s population and represent up to 80% of global emissions. Cities are not bound by federal or multi-lateral agreements (or in this case lack thereof) like federal governments. We can already see examples of cities taking leadership: in 2005, former Seattle mayor Greg Nickels launched what became the U.S. Mayors for Climate Protection Center. More than 1,000 U.S. mayors have now signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, committing to reducing their cities’ emissions below 1990 levels.‬

Of course, U.S. cities are far from alone in taking leadership on climate change. ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability) represents some 1,200 cities around the world (U.S. included) who are also promoting climate action. The C40, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, has brought together some of the largest metropolitan cities around the globe to develop best practices for mitigating and adapting to climate change. The Covenant of Mayors in Europe has more than 3,000 participating cities committed to meeting and exceeding the EU’s regional reduction target of 20% by 2020.‬

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Action at the municipal level requires investment in R&D and innovation. Increasingly, cities around the globe are turning to the private sector for solutions, rather than waiting for federal and multinational funds and legislative support. New York City, led by Mayor Bloomberg’s commitment to the low-carbon economy, has one of the largest EV fleets in North America. Cities like Portland, Oregon are creating their own eco-districts and purchasing localized energy systems. Barcelona’s mayor just announced the launch of a Smart City Campus to bring other cities, the private sector, and the NGO community together to pilot new smart grid and smart city technologies. ‬

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Sustainable Cities)

Infographic: The Benefits of Biking

(Via Momentum Magazine)